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Citizens Against Government Waste Highlights USPS Task Force’s Final Report

For Immediate Release
Contact: Curtis Kalin 202-467-5318

December 4, 2018

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) highlighted key recommendations in the final report of the White House’s Task Force on the United States Postal Service (USPS). CAGW was privileged to contribute to the report.

CAGW Vice President for Policy and Communications Leslie Paige said in a statement:

“After 12 consecutive years of losses, only market-oriented reforms can save the USPS from a grim fiscal fate. We concur with the task force’s conclusion that USPS must immediately right-size its operations by cutting costs and expanding its logistical partnerships with the private sector. These potential private-sector partners already process and deliver mail more effectively than the USPS. Therefore, new third-party relationships would lower costs and make more efficient a business model that is circling the financial drain.

“The report correctly rejects any USPS foray into banking services due to the agency’s ‘narrow expertise and capital limitations,’ maintaining that the risk of such a venture would be too great. The report recommends that the USPS downsize its old brick-and-mortar infrastructure by converting stores into contract locations or co-locating and renting with similar private-sector retailers.

“The report notes that 76 percent of the USPS’s operating costs are for labor. The report recommends that USPS ‘align compensation for both its career and non-career workers with peers in the broader labor market.’ Reforms in this area would dramatically reduce costs and put the USPS on a level playing field with its private sector counterparts.”

“While many of the task force’s recommendations would require congressional action, the report will, at minimum, stimulate a much-needed debate about the future of the Postal Service. All of these reforms should be taken seriously by the USPS. Without a change in direction, taxpayers will be on the hook for the USPS’s ever-increasing financial losses.”

Citizens Against Government Waste is the nation’s largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.